How Thrive Leads Plugin and Lightboxes Generates 1%-9% Conversions 👏

What do the Thrive leads plugin and lead generation tools have in common? Let’s take some time to find out.

There are 1,300 entrepreneurs performing a search for lead generation tools every month.

The phrase, lead generation services, is researched over 1,600 times and lead generation strategies over 1,300 times.

If you are in business or thinking of starting a business you know that it is super important to generate an income. In order to get that income, you know you need to get prospects or leads.

The truth is many entrepreneurs and small businesses have an idea in their head that they need to generate some form of revenue.

However, many continue to struggle because they are not quite sure what a funnel is or even a landing page let alone how to build an email list.

In this post, I will spend some time looking at what lead generation is all about, why it is important and the tools you can use to take action.

Lead Generation Tools

What on earth are lead generation tools? Any piece of hardware or software that is needed in the sales funnel process to help with conversion rate optimisation can be considered a lead generation tool.

Lead generation tools can include an email marketing service, list building plugin also known as a lead generation plugin and optin forms.

Let’s start with a simple example of a lemonade stand on a hot summer’s day in your little neighbourhood.

The fact that your neighbour’s 12-year-old daughter decided to set up a lemonade stand on a hot summer’s day is not a coincidence. People are inherently lazy to a certain extent.

You can either walk 5 minutes to your house to get an ice cold drink or pay this girl $1 for a glass of ice cold lemonade which would you choose?

Did you know that enterprise-level retailers use software with built-in short and long-term weather predictions to help them decide what to sell and when to sell these items?

The fact that you walk into a department store on a day in Spring with unexpected sunshine and they have all their summer clothing on display is no coincidence. They ‘saw’ it coming.

Disclaimer: please note that this post may contain affiliate links which means that if you buy one of my recommended products I get paid a commission for sharing the link. I only recommend products that I have tried myself and have experienced success.

Photo by Kelly Leeves

Conversion Rate Optimisation

Before I discuss why these tools are important, let me spend some time helping you understand conversion rate optimisation (CRO).

Your neighbour’s 12-year-old daughter can employ some strategies to improve the chances of her meeting daily sales targets.

Her lemonade stand can be visually appealing by using a nicely designed advert on the front of her cart. She can send out fliers days before she sets up.

She can also increase the lifetime value of her customer by selling cookies as well as muffins with her lemonade.

As an added bonus she can decide to take payment by Paypal and Stripe and start collecting email addresses.

Basically, she can increase her conversions from lead to sale and lowering her cost of acquisition by employing a few clever strategies.

These strategies are under the umbrella of conversion rate optimisation which in its simplest form is optimising conversion ratios to increase sales.

Why Are Lead Generation Tools and CRO Important

Well, if you are already in business you will know that it can take a lot of effort and resources to generate leads for your business.

Using the best tools and strategies that are available on the market increases your chances of success. Are you familiar with the term “build it and they will come?”

Just because you have a website does not mean potential customers are going to approach you with credit cards in hand ready to buy.

One of the things you need to do in order to generate income is to create a funnel. The goal of having a funnel is to get potential customers to convert or buy from you at different points in that funnel.

People have different buyer behaviours so some would inevitably take longer than others to make their decision to buy or commit.

Below is an example of a funnel to help you understand what is involved.

How To Get People Into Your Funnel

At this point you are probably wondering how on earth do you create a funnel and how do you get people into that funnel.

I’m so glad you asked me that question. Before I answer it though I need to give you an example of a simple funnel as this is an important step in the process of lead generation.

At the start of any funnel, you will have content in some form or another. It could be a blog post, social media post, landing page or mobile app.

After your potential customer engages with your content you will need to have a call to action (CTA) for them to take an action.

That action could be to subscribe to a newsletter, email list, download a freebie or make a purchase. Whatever the action is you will need a lead generation tool to help build trust.

Believe it or not many lead generation experts have conducted tests on what works and give the highest conversion rates compared with what does not work.

The Thrive leads plugin is a great example of that because the folks at Thrive Themes eat their own dog food so they know what combination of text, colours and buttons will give you the best conversions.

Thrive Themes Tools

In fact, they are so good at it that they have developed landing pages, themes, widgets and light boxes. This means instead of you trying to reinvent the wheel you can steal their research and use it for your business.

Let’s spend some time together look at a number of these popular tools to see how it can help your business.

Thrive Leads Plugin

The Thrive leads plugin is a neat little plugin that works really well if you are using WordPress.org or if you have a WordPress website as your content management system. Even if you have managed WordPress hosting.

It allows you to create lead forms on the fly where you get to choose from existing templates and customise it to suit your business and brand.

Here’s the kicker! It integrates really well with your email marketing provider so that all you need to do is spend 10 minutes or less setting it all up then with a cool shortcode you can have the lead form live and ready on your site to collect leads.

The magic happens when you can see from a simple dashboard how your leads are performing based on where they are placed in your content.

Thrive Themes Landing Pages

One of my favourite features from Thrive Themes is their Landing Page builder. They have a whole library of options available to choose from using the Thrive Architect plugin.

If you are like me and you probably spend time creating the perfect blog post with over 2,000 words and reference links to external sites as well as related internal links you then realise that the CTA is a landing page.

You have two options, you can either create one from scratch using HTML and CSS or you can create one on the fly using the Thrive Architect Plugin. In less than 10 minutes, Boom! It’s ready!

Thrive Clever Widgets

Another handy creation from Thrive Themes is Thrive Clever Widgets which lets you place your CTAs on the sidebar or in the footer of your site.

Just in case you were not aware of it one of the best places of the prime real estate on your website is the humble sidebar.

It gives your website visitors another option to take advantage of the goodies that you have on offer. Thrive Clever Widgets can help you with CRO.

You just need to decide what you want in the sidebar and place the necessary items from opt-in forms to recent blog posts to items in your shop.

Did I just say shop?

Thrive Themes Woocommerce

Should you decide to have a shop attached to your site then Thrive Themes can facilitate. They have the ability to easily integrate your Thrive Theme to Woocommerce using a plugin.

It took me seconds to get it done so I am sure that this is something that you can do too. The beauty of using Woocommerce is that you have total control over the shop and the Woocommerce plugin is free.

Just install the plugin and follow the step by step instructions. You will, of course, need to have your images, item descriptions and pricing ready to populate your shop.

You can even use it to sell digital products if this is what you want to do.

Thrive Lightboxes

The last item on my list is Thrive lightboxes which are an attractive way of collecting leads from your website visitors.

In simple language, it is an email opt-in form that dims everything else in the background and keeps the form 100% in focus giving your prospect an offer.

Here is an example of one of my Thrive lightboxes. Pretty cool right? They tend to have a higher opt-in rate compared to the regular lead forms.

Thrive Leads Plugin Form Types

Here’s is my Thrive leads review, what makes Thrive leads plugin super awesome when compared to the standard email marketing services optin forms is the fact that they have several form types on offer.

These form types include your standard in content lead capture form, ribbon, widget, slide up, screen filler and the lightbox.

To keep everything in a logical order these forms are kept in specific lead groups making it easy for a blogger to use yet comprehensive and intelligent enough for a scale up business.

Using Thrive leads also gives the user full control over a very large blog with old content as there is no need to insert any code in individual blog posts.

Each lead group is then stacked in the order of priority which automatically tells the system when to show the form based on set criteria.

Each lead group can have several lead types that can be used for A/B split testing to see which lead form gives the highest conversion.

There is a second section called lead shortcodes that gives the user the flexibility of using a shortcode to implement the required lead form.

The Ultimate Sales Funnel

Now that I have gone through the items that you need to build a sales funnel lets put together a visual of what your sales funnel should contain.

Virtual Assitant Services – You can go ahead and create your very own welcome email introducing yourself to your prospects. If you are stuck and need to outsource this you can check out my virtual assistant packages here.

Depending on what you are selling you can create your very own email sequence to take your prospect from a new lead to a buyer. If this is not your strong suit check out my VA packages here.

Your Product – You will know what you want to sell to your prospect. You can sell an email course, ebook or a full-blown video course it is up to you to decide.

Value Ladder – Be sure to create your value ladder so that you know what will be a worthy upsell item for your customer to buy after they make their first or second purchase.

How I Get Between 1% And 9% Conversions

It is not uncommon for a blogger to use several different tools for each stage of their funnel process. In other words, it is quite easy to use LeadPages for your landing page.

OptinMonster for lead capture forms, ConverKit for email marketing, Canva for content upgrades, Newspaper Theme for the blog theme, etc.

Many months ago I was considering doing the same thing which I know would cost me a lot of money for my blog’s budget.

One can easily argue that I would be using the best of breed when it comes to each part of the funnel process. However, what is really important is the conversions when you are on a tight budget.

As you can see from the screenshot, which is one of the coolest Thrive leads features, my conversions are acceptable especially when you consider that the online marketing average is 1%.

Here is a screenshot of the results from another day, very early in the morning. All three conversions came from Pinterest.

As I already mentioned Thrive leads plugin comes complete with its own dashboard and you have the ability to see which one of your opt-in forms is driving the conversions.

The ones that are not performing well can be easily tweaked using conversion rate optimisation or simply adjusting the location of your form as well as the form that you used can be changed.

It is safe to say that I get between 1% and 9% conversion rates by using the Thrive leads plugin. As well as testing and tweaking and ensuring that my content upgrade or offer matches the content that my audience consumes.

Conclusion

Lead generation tools and conversion rate optimisation can be as scary or as easy as you want it to be. The Thrive lead plugin makes it easy this is way it is one of the best list building plugins.

In any sales funnel, there are a complex number of items that you need to put together to make it work. You can either develop them from scratch or use ready-made tools.

You can spend a lot of time being the jack of all trades or because time is precious you can spend time doing what you do best and let the Thrive lead plugin give you a shortcut.

I decided a long time ago to really focus on being creative and on strategy. So I spend most of my time writing blog posts and creating products and services rather than coding landing pages and lead forms.

For less than $40/month I could get all the professional looking lead capture forms, landing pages and tools that I need to assist with lead generation.

What about you? Will you do the same?

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41 COMMENTS

This is a very helpful post for those using WordPress. As I understand it, the plugins are great and can do a lot for you and your blog. I use SquareSpace and like it very much. It would be terrific if you could make a similar post related specifically to Squarespace. Thanks so much for sharing.

This is very thorough and helpful for those after leads. Actually, I never knew that some plugins could help to easen the work out. That’s awesome! Hoping to use the plugin once I relaunch my store again.

The lemonade story reminds me of a trip to the gas station yesterday. One station was priced 6 cents more and I could see people using that one instead of waiting in line for the cheaper one next to this station as they are too busy to wait.

On my website I do work a lot with affiliates to I share this funnel with them. I know that some of them have better systems than other and I prefer to work with the ones that I know will convert better because they have their funnel streamlined.

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